[WikiEN-l] What is happening to the community

[Ray Saintonge]

Oldak Quill wrote:
> On 06/03/2008, David Gerard  wrote:
>   
>> On 06/03/2008, Wily D  wrote:
>>
>>  > Even today, as a vetern user of a couple years, I find it very easy to
>>  >  edit articles and only run into helpful, friendly people.  I just
>>  >  follow a few simple rules.
>>
>> I've been creating articles. It's fun. Today I started [[List of Ecma
>>  standards]], which (a) needs completion (b) needs articles on each
>>  standard.
>>
>>  It's not a matter of Wikipedia having all the "low-hanging fruit" - we
>>  have all the fruit that's fallen off the tree. Twenty million topics
>>  have been identified as being within arms' reach ...
>>
>>  Two million? We've barely started.
>>     
> Definitely. See the following for just some of the subjects "at arms'
> length": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_comparisons
>
> A selection:
> *"The Guide Star Catalog II has entries on 998,402,801 distinct
> astronomical objects searchable online."
> *"The British Library is known to hold over 150 million items."
> *"Genbank, an online database of DNA sequences from over 165,000
> species , has over 46 million entries"
> *"The National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) GEOnet Names Server
> contains approximately 3.88 million named"
> *"Thomson-Gale's Biography Resource Center contains over 1,335,000 biographies."
> *"31 million CAS registry numbers have been allocated for chemical compounds."
> *"the Internet Movie Database claims to have records on 549,131 titles
> and 2,280,301 names."
>
>   
It's great that some people recognize the size of the task at hand.  I 
would add that a single monthly periodical publication that lasts for a 
century at 100 pages per month will generate 120,000 pages of material 
during that time.  At 200 words per page that's already 24,000,000 
words.  That's alrady bigger than the /"Enciclopedia universal 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enciclopedia_universal_ilustrada_europeo-americana>".  
/All our notability debates do nothing to cope with the massive amount 
of data that is available.  I've lately been buying up bound 19th 
century periodicals very cheap; One of the latest ones has been about 50 
annual reprint volumes of "Gentleman's Magazine" at roughly $1.00 each 
.  Libraries can't keep up with the storage, and the smart ones at least 
salvage a little cash by selling them on line.  With many others it's a 
short trip to the dumpster.

Material that lacks notability is mostly harmless.  Some of it can be 
the seed for some future bigger article in the distant future when it 
gets someone wondering.  In the big scheme of things it does not take up 
a lot of disk space, but the arguments about deleting it take up far 
more disk space. 

When presented in a respectful way that gives everyone a chance to 
respond, there is no argument over notability.  In an atmosphere of 
trust nobody feels so beset by rapid-fire tagging, because they are 
confident that the deletion proposals have been carefully reviewed by 
humans with a sense of judgement.  They don't have to feel like Lucille 
Ball in the chocolate factory.

A rule of thumb for the deletionists might be: For every article that 
you delete you must add one.  Given the professedly high standards upon 
which someone relies for deletion, one should be able to expect that 
that person's inclusion standards will be just as high.

Ec